The departure of the summer heat means two things - the Oscar-worthy movies finally show up, as do the most commercial books. November brings a particularly strong crop of non-fiction titles.

Dan Wakefield has edited a very entertaining collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s letters that are a lot better than most of Kurt Vonnegut’s books in that his letters are less absurd and considerably warmer.

Michael Slater, the pre-eminent Charles Dickens scholar, has written a book a lot of people have been waiting for: “The Great Charles Dickens Scandal,” about Dickens’ relationship with his mistress, Ellen Ternan - a secret life discovered entirely by accident and which few people in the early 20th century wanted to believe.

For literary history in America, Robert Graysmith, the author of “Zodiac,” has written “Black Fire,” the story of Mark Twain’s friend Tom Sawyer, whose name Twain appropriated for a pretty fair novel, and some of whose personal history also came into play in the novel’s plotting. Graysmith is also a talented artist, and his work illustrates this well-told history.

History offers the usual grouping of books about World War II, but one stands out. Most books about World War II are macro, but Alex Kershaw has written one that’s micro. “The Liberator” follows Felix Sparks from his arrival as a greenhorn second lieutenant in the mid-1943 landing in Sicily, through his liberation of Dachau two years later. After the war, Sparks became a successful lawyer, and died in 2007. Kershaw’s book makes Sparks a living symbol for all the good men who fought the war.

In show business biography, Ethan Mordden has written a dual biography of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya entitled “Love Song.” Weill was the great composer of “The Threepenny Opera,” “Lost in the Stars,” “Lady in the Dark” and “One Touch of Venus”; Lenya was Pirate Jenny, Bond’s nemesis Ilsa Klebb, the landlady in “Cabaret.” Together they devised a new vernacular for both European and Broadway musical theater.

And Margaret Talbot has written “The Entertainer,” a memoir about her father, the actor Lyle Talbot, which uses his long life as a way of examining the changes in America popular culture, from the medicine show era of the late 19th century, to the TV era - Talbot played the next door neighbor of “Ozzie and Harriet.” It’s a warm, affectionate book.

In fiction, anything by Pat Barker is always of interest. Barker’s great subject is the decimating events of World War I, and “Toby’s Room” is a sequel to “Life Class.” Toby Brooke is posted to the front in 1914, goes missing and his sister Elinor begins a quest to find him - or his body.

At the same time, the ever-reliable Nelson DeMille’s “The Panther” will undoubtedly climb the best-seller lists, just as 12 of DeMille’s previous novels have. This one is about John Corey, an anti-terrorist agent, and his FBI agent wife in an operation aimed at taking out an Al Quaeda operative.

And speaking of best-seller lists, there’s John Grisham’s “The Racketeer,” about a disbarred lawyer languishing in the federal pen who knows something about the murder of a federal judge and hopes to leverage that knowledge into freedom….or something.

And with the holidays hoving into view, perhaps it’s time for Pete Hamill, who has written another one of his nostalgic reveries about New York the way it used to be. “The Christmas Kid And Other Brooklyn Stories” was originally written for the “New York Post” in the 1980s, but this is the first book publication - it’s a wise writer who never throws anything away. The stories are charming and, if you happened to be there, probably must-reading.